


Teach Me How I Should Forget To Think

by izzyb



Category: Romeo And Juliet - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-02
Updated: 2012-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-28 18:06:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/310661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/izzyb/pseuds/izzyb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was always on the sidelines, waiting for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Teach Me How I Should Forget To Think

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Lady Fest 2010 for the prompt: "Romeo & Juliet, girl!Benvolio, kissing cousins." Set in the 1996 movieverse.

She watched him fall in love time and time again, watched his head bend over his journals, his shaggy locks hiding his eyes from her as he sorted out his feelings. She liked to sit next to him on the sand, her thigh almost touching his, and feel his weight shift towards her as his pencil glided across the pages.

And she wondered if that night he would show up in her room again, if she would once more have the chance to comfort him.

The first time was when they just hit puberty and Romeo started noticing girls and girls started noticing him. But not always the ones he wanted. She teased him when he faced rejection, punching him, saying he always wanted the older ones, why not try for someone his own age?

He gave her a wounded look and rubbed his arm before attacking her and wrestling her to the ground under him, his eyes bright. When she smiled up at him, his look had turned serious and he’d stared at her lips, so she leaned up and kissed him.

“I don’t—“ he protested and rolled over onto his back and thrown his arm across his eyes like she’d slain him.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she said to the sky.

But it did.

Every time a girl broke his heart, he came to her and they would talk, exchanging confidences in the early hours of the morning, kissing a little, and eventually curling up together on the bed.

They never did more than that though—Romeo said that was going too far, she deserved better.

When he started ranting to her with cigarette waving in the air about a girl named Rosaline, she told him that he deserved better too.

He didn’t listen.

Or at least that’s what she thought.

She joined forces with Mercutio to drag him to a party the night of the street brawl (in which she’d faced her favorite person in the whole world, oh-so-glad she had a gun strapped to her thigh) with the tantalizing prospect of seeing her there. He seemed to have be okay, mingling with their enemies, high on some drug Mercutio called “Queen Mab.”

At the time, she didn’t realize that Rosaline wasn’t even there, that Romeo had ditched them, that she was on the brink of losing him forever.

That realization came later, after she waited for Rosaline to reject him again, for him to crawl through her window and tell her all about it.

He never came.

She never told anyone that she cried harder that night than she did when she learned of his death, but she had lost him long before he drank the poison.


End file.
